Moving the Airport
Tuesday, 21 December 1999
As the summer months are finally upon us, the
weather in Antarctica is spectacular. We have been having beautiful
sunny days with very little wind and temperatures in the mid–30's.
I cannot believe I am saying this, but after the weather we have had,
these days truly are warm enough to work outside in a t–shirt.
It is amazing. I cannot believe it.
Accompanying all this warm weather is the
encroaching ice breakup. The ice is starting to break up a mere 25
miles from here. In a few weeks the icebreaker will be coming through
McMurdo Sound and we will be able to start getting ships into port.
Our airport has been located just a couple of
miles out on the sea ice of McMurdo Sound. That area is a convenient
location to town, and because it is ice rather than snow, planes can
land on their wheels rather than on skis. That also allows larger
and heavier planes to land. As the ice has been getting thinner, the
heavier planes stopped coming here several weeks ago. It is time to
move our airport to a more stable location. That location is Williams
Field, more commonly known as Willy Field. It is about 7 miles from
here out on the Ross Sea. The sea ice there is around 160 feet thick.
At Willy Field there are many feet of packed snow
over all the ice. All the planes that land there have to be equipped
with skis. That means that we will only get the lighter planes for
the next month or so. Then we will set up another airport which will
be on ice again so that we can get larger planes, but it will be
much further away. That will last until the last plane leaves here
sometime around the end of February. After that time, no planes will
be able to land until after the winter, sometime in August.
This week we had to move the entire airport from
the ice runway near town out to Willy Field. All of the electricians
became linemen for this job. We had to go out and unhook power from
all the buildings out there. That meant climbing power poles and up
on top of the buildings.
There were about 12 of us working on it and we got it all down in
under two hours. All of the buildings are built on skis. After all
the power is down, they take diesel heaters and melt the skis out
of the ice. Then they hook up each building to a large tractor and
haul it across the ice to Willy Field. The power poles had to be
blasted out of the ice.
Everyone expected to see the poles fly up out of the ice, but no
such luck. What you see in the picture was all there was. There was
not much of an explosion to see and the poles remained standing.
But they were able to be lifted right out of the ice.
They moved buildings all night long. The next
day we went out to Willy and had to hook up all the power. That
was a much larger job and took us about 6–7 hours. We still
broke all the past records. After all of the preliminary work that
we did digging out runway lights, the new airport was up and running
in less than 24 hours after the old one closed. Not a bad job.
A fun little side note is that when you drive
out to Willy Field, just at the point where the land and sea meet,
you always have to stop the truck, get out and beat the truck with
a wooden bat to shake all of the mud and dirt off the truck. They
want to keep as little black dirt off the ice as possible because
it heats up and melts the ice, causing the roads to get really
messed up. So we all get to work out our frustrations beating up
on the trucks. Needless to say none of our trucks look so great
anymore. We are getting all new ones when the ships start coming
in. The ones we have now are pretty old and worn.
Christmas will be here very soon. There are
several Christmas parties planned and of course there will be a
big dinner on Christmas day. We have been waiting for package mail
for about 7 weeks now. All other mail and cargo takes priority
over our mail. Science of course is the first priority, followed
by construction materials, and many other things. I had my Christmas
cards mailed down here so that I could post them all from Antarctica.
Finally, today, just in time for Christmas, they flew in 23,000
pounds of package mail for us. I am afraid Christmas cards will be
a bit late this year.
I skua–ed a small artificial Christmas
tree for my room. There were a few ornaments that came with it,
but not much. So I made some candy canes out of red and white
electrical wire, and used different colored wire nuts on the ends
of the limbs. My roommate strung some popcorn to go on it. The
only thing I did not have were lights. Then today I got a care
package from my friend Gayle, and lo and behold — Christmas
lights. So I am all set.
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